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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The number and variety of sensors and tracking devices coming to healthcare is astounding. All of these devices are going to provide a platform for hundreds of innovative companies to build amazing software on top of all of this hardware that will really impact healthcare. It’s exciting to see.

I saw this in action first hand when I talked with Eran Ofir, CEO and Co-Founder of Somatix. What makes Somatix interesting is that they do their hand gesture tracking on any hardware. There are dozens of off the shelf wearable technologies from tech giants, high-end brands, sports leaders, and fashion brands which can be used together with Somatix.

Using these off the shelf technologies, Somatix does a pretty wide range of gesture detection including: smoking, eating, drinking (cold and hot), teeth brushing, walking, sleeping, shaving, medication intaking, and more. When you think about the sensors that are available in these commercial wearables, it’s not hard to see how this type of gesture detection is possible. Plus, these charts illustrate how different gestures register on wearables:

It’s not hard to imagine how this gesture recognition technology can be used in healthcare. It can detect sudden falls, medication adherence, immobility, sleeping habits, missed meals, low liquid consumption, smoking, and even neurological malfunctioning.

The question is what do you do once a certain action is detected? Somatix is doing some work in this area as well. Detecting the gesture is just the first step, but can work as a trigger to enable care providers to intervene with personalized messages and incentives to the patient. One of the areas where Somatix has seen success is in their SmokeBeat product which helps with smoking cessation.

As I look at the bigger picture, I could see hundreds of applications of this gesture technology in healthcare. So, I asked Eran if Somatix offered an API that would allow startup companies, health systems, payers, and other healthcare organizations to be able to incorporate this gesture recognition technology into their own applications. Unfortunately, they haven’t gone this route yet since they’re a relatively young company, but he saw that as a potential future opportunity. I hope they take that route since gesture recognition across all of these devices is a hard thing to build, but is a powerful thing that could benefit a wide variety of healthcare applications.

All in all, I was impressed by what Somatix has built. Plus, it was easy to see as they get more hand gesture data how they’ll be able to improve the accuracy of the gesture detection even more. Eran described how they’d seen this first hand with detecting smoking which they can now detect almost perfectly. While all of the gesture detection doesn’t have perfect accuracy it will get pretty close over time.

Healthcare still has a ways to go in figuring out how to turn gesture recognition into improved care, but it’s great to see companies like Somatix perfecting the recognition which will enable care providers to use that data to improve a patient’s health. Gesture recognition technology from Somatix is a great example of a building block of change that will transform healthcare as we know it.

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